After covering the environment and energy beat for more than a decade, columnist Amanda Little decided that the only way to fully understand America’s energy crisis was to travel into the heart of it. So she embarked on a daring, cross-country power trip to the most extreme and exciting frontiers of our energy landscape.

In Power Trip, we accompany her to a deep-sea oil rig, the cornfields of Kansas, the catacombs of the Pentagon, the Talladega Superspeedway, and inside New York City’s electrical grid. We visit laboratories creating the innovations that will carry us into a clean-energy future. Little also travels back through history to investigate how America developed its unrivaled appetite for fossil fuels. In vivid, fast-paced prose, she illustrates how the same American ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it too.